So what do I mean by bread and butter issues? Well, the commentary linked above is focused mostly on the concerns about income and wealth distribution that have been salient for a while and have gotten a lot of press in recent years. But in addition, there's something much more recent and fundamental working against the KMT right now: the economy is just not doing very well. Here's a sample of the (English-language) economic news reports coming out of Taiwan over the last few months:

What all that reporting is trying to say can be summed up succinctly by the chart at the top of this page: Taiwan's economy is now rather suddenly headed into a recession, if it's not already in one. And that makes this a terrible moment to be running as an incumbent party.

Say it, Bill

Economic Voting in Democracies. The theory of economic voting behind this claim is that economic conditions powerfully shape electoral outcomes in democracies everywhere. As Michael Lewis-Beck puts it in a great review article, "good times keep parties in office, bad times cast them out."

I should note that the evidence for this effect and its size varies a lot across countries, and the sometimes puzzling variation in the size of economic effects remains an open area of inquiry in political science.

In addition, voters turn out to have really short memories (i.e. they're "myopic," in the jargon of the discipline): the performance of the economy over the last six months matters a great deal more than the performance over a government's whole term in office. This is probably why the Conservatives in Britain, for instance, recently won re-election after presiding over an austerity-induced downturn during much of their first term.

Economic Voting in Taiwan? So what about in Taiwan? Given the current political environment, we should expect the state of the economy to have a major impact on the upcoming election. Taiwan right now has:

A long tradition of "stewardship" of the economy by the central government, dating back to the early martial law era, so the incumbent party at the national level is assumed to have significant responsibility for economic performance;

In short, this is close to a worst-case scenario for an incumbent party: standing for re-election during an unexpected economic downturn that appears to be linked directly to your own policies. Voters will kill you for that just about anywhere. Which brings me to the trends in election polls...

That's a large gap. (Source: TISR, 2015.12.14)

Bad Economy = Bad Polls. At about the same point that the economy started to sour over the last six months, Taiwan's presidential election turned from a competitive race into a rout. As the Taiwan Indicators Survey Research survey reproduced above shows, at the beginning of June, one could at least imagine a combined pan-blue effort that would give Tsai Ing-wen a real race: support for Hung Hsiu-chu and James Soong together was at 44.8%, above Tsai's 37.1%. But then what happened? Support for both cratered.

Part of that was Hung's own shortcomings as a candidate, but once she was replaced by Eric Chu, the KMT should have seen a real bounce. It hasn't. Chu is now down around 20% in the polls. That's likely to go up somewhat as pan-blue voters come back to the fold, and there are other polls showing him getting up to 30%. But even if pan-blue voters coordinated on a single candidate, the combined Chu-Soong support is nowhere near enough to make this a race anymore. It's all but over now.

Some of this decline in the polls is undoubtedly self-inflicted--the fiasco with Hung and the presence of James Soong in a spoiler's role yet again could probably have been avoided. But even if Eric Chu had accepted the nomination back in March, and Soong hadn't joined the race, I still don't think this would be much of a contest right now. The reason is those economic figures: Chu is the standard-bearer for a party that in voters' eyes is squarely to blame for this economic downturn, and they're going to have a chance in less than three weeks to weigh in.

​Tsai Ing-wen is not Ma Ying-jeou or the KMT, and in these circumstances that looks like all she needs to win a comfortable victory. Cross-Strait policy, debate performances, campaign promises, VP selections--none of it is going to matter. In this election, it really is about the economy.

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About Me

I am a political scientist by training, with interests in democratization, parties and elections, and the politics of new and developing democracies. My regional expertise is in East Asia, with special focus on Taiwan.